Data communications has grown rapidly in the past decade due to the reach of internet. The number of users relying on data communications has increased significantly in the recent past. This increase in number of users and in turn the amount of data traffic per communication link poses various challenges in providing high quality of service to the users. For example, a communication system offering real time communication services such as voice and/or video is more tolerant to transmission errors than delay. On the other hand, a communication system offering communication services such as file transfer is more tolerant to delay than transmission errors, and therefore necessitates data retransmission for portions of data with errors. Communication systems offering data traffic services employ retransmission techniques for enabling a source station to retransmit data to a destination station to reduce the transmission errors. Such communication systems also employ various techniques to improve the throughput of the communication network, bandwidth efficiency, and reliability of data communication.
One such technique is link adaptation in which the attributes of each link within a communication system are updated. Communication systems may update link adaptation parameters such as modulation and coding scheme, data protection schemes, transmission power, and the like to accommodate different needs of communication. Communication systems employing existing technologies generally use fixed target error rates which are stringent, modulation and coding scheme which is conservative, and error protection which is robust in order to minimize retransmissions across all types of data. Adjustments are made to maximize both throughput and reliability and minimize retransmissions. However, there is a scope for improvement to the existing technologies in terms of optimizing the target error rates for link adaptation for certain types of applications without significant impact on overall throughput and reliability.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present disclosure.
The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present disclosure so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.